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the cedars seemed to reflect from her neck.
    Shimamura looked up at the cedar branches. “It’s all over. My strength left me—really, it seems very funny.”
    From behind the rock, the cedars threw up their trunks in perfectly straight lines, so high that he could see the tops only by arching his back. The dark needles blocked out the sky, and the stillness seemed to be singing quietly. The trunk against which Shimamura leaned was the oldest of all. For some reason all the branches on the north side had withered, and, their tips broken and fallen, they looked like stakes driven into the trunk with their sharp ends but, to make a terrible weapon for some god.
    “I made a mistake. I saw you as soon as I came down from the mountains, and I let myself thinkthat all the geisha here were like you,” he laughed. It occurred to him now that the thought of washing away in such short order the vigor of seven days in the mountains had perhaps first come to him when he saw the cleanness of this woman.
    She gazed down at the river, distant in the afternoon sun. Shimamura was a little unsure of himself.
    “I forgot,” she suddenly remarked, with forced lightness. “I brought your tobacco. I went back up to your room a little while ago and found that you had gone out. I wondered where you could be, and then I saw you running up the mountain for all you were worth. I watched from the window. You were very funny. But you forgot your tobacco. Here.”
    She took the tobacco from her kimono sleeve and lighted a match for him.
    “I wasn’t very nice to that poor girl.”
    “But it’s up to the guest, after all, when he wants to let the geisha go.”
    Through the quiet, the sound of the rocky river came up to them with a rounded softness. Shadows were darkening in the mountain chasms on the other side of the valley, framed in the cedar branches.
    “Unless she were as good as you, I’d feel cheated when I saw you afterwards.”
    “Don’t talk to me about it. You’re just unwilling to admit you lost, that’s all.” There was scorn inher voice, and yet an affection of quite a new sort flowed between them.
    As it became clear to Shimamura that he had from the start wanted only this woman, and that he had taken his usual roundabout way of saying so, he began to see himself as rather repulsive and the woman as all the more beautiful. Something from that cool figure had swept through him after she called to him from under the cedars.
    The high, thin nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little circle of leeches. Even when she was silent her lips seemed always to be moving. Had they had wrinkles or cracks, or had their color been less fresh, they would have struck one as unwholesome, but they were never anything but smooth and shining. The line of her eyelids neither rose nor fell. As if for some special reason, it drew its way straight across her face. There was something faintly comical about the effect, but the short, thick hair of her eyebrows sloped gently down to enfold the line discreetly. There was nothing remarkable about the outlines of her round, slightly aquiline face. With her skin like white porcelain coated over a faint pink, and her throat still girlish, not yet filled out, the impression she gave was above all one of cleanness, not quite one of real beauty.
    Her breasts were rather full for a woman used to the high, binding obi of the geisha.
    “The sand flies have come out,” she said, standing up and brushing at the skirt of her kimono.
    Alone in the quiet, they could think of little to say.
    It was perhaps ten o’clock that night. The woman called loudly to Shimamura from the hall, and a moment later she fell into his room as if someone had thrown her. She collapsed in front of the table. Flailing with a drunken arm at everything that happened to be on it, she poured herself a glass of water and drank in great gulps.
    She had gone out to meet